THE SHORT FILM MOVEMENT+ PRESENTS SONGS OF REFLECTION
Often, short films receive little attention and are disregarded as calling cards for directors or opening acts to feature films. Short films, however, are more than a bland appetizer to the main course; they can capture moments or feelings relatable to all in less than a minute. Latoya Gill and her organisation the Short Film Movement+ are helping audiences discover and rethink short films. This Thursday, Gill and her movement present Songs of Reflection: an event that will screen shorts that appropriately cover the theme of reflection. The soirée will also include a discussion and performances.
The Short Film Movement+ is a space where creative types can come together and explore ideas related to the human condition. The + in the name represents other forms of creative expression utilized in meetings such as poetry, music, and dance. The organisation also aims to promote quality independent films that have either been overlooked or have gathered dust on the shelf.
In keeping with the Short Film Movement +’s underground philosophy, it operates like a speakeasy. The gatherings are held in the basement of the barbershop, We Are Cuts in Soho. Entry price is four pounds (or three if one comes prepared to contribute to the discussion). Guests are also encouraged to bring snacks to share.
Thursday 30th October at We Are Cuts, 33A Dean Street, London, W1D 4PP
PRICE: £4 – £3 TIME: 8PM
Don’t forget to bring a snack!
A work in review: NATALLIA PILIPENKA
There is little that conceptually links Natallia Pilipenka’s seven collections. The fashion designer reflects on different moments and struggles in her life through her passion, making clothes. Pilipenka has had a need to create since her youth: she started with crocheting and expanded her practice to embroidery, knitting, and sewing. Pilipenka completed her studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology and has received various awards throughout the years. Currently, she teaches fashion design at Parsons The New School For Design and participates in InvestFashion.
Pilipenka draws much inspiration from her Ukrainian background; however, she thanks New York for giving her creativity boundless energy. She explains, “NYC is everything, and such a unique city in this way. There is a certain aura of romanticism, dream, opportunity, speed, and raw beauty here. I love the pace of it, it always keeps me busy and the amount of inspiration that I come across every single moment is inspiring by itself.” Like the frantic rhythm of New York, Pilipenka’s process bears no structure. Her practice begins with an idea, which leads to a combination of research, experimentations, obsession, possibilities, and decisions. Each of Pilipenka’s seven collections carries a style contrasting to that of the last, like that of Madonna’s on every new album release. The only theme one can find woven through her collections is her passion for the craft.
Pilipenka’s latest collection, ‘Erased’, is the most serious of all of the designer’s work. “Erased” is her thesis for the MFA Fashion, Design and Society program at Parsons. The designer plays with the ideas of “removal” of something while “highlighting” something else in order to explore themes of identity. Pilipenka was inspired by deconstruction in text and art, in particular the works of poet Stéphane Mallarmé and painter Robert Rauschenberg “The ‘Erased de Kooning’ painting by Rauschenberg presented me with an idea of forced collaboration, as well as the question of whether or not you can remove one’s identity from their work.” Pilipenka pushes the idea of forced collaboration with her choice of technique and fabrics such as devoré, airbrushing, textile, yarn combinations, and knit stitches. Dueling relationships through out her aesthetics, black vs. white, flowing vs. structure, also reveal an exploration of the self in the designers work.
Although Pillipenka’s work seems to take a creative 180 with every collection, it is the quality and love of her craft that remains consistent. Her work portrays issues that were of importance to her at the time, something she needed to resolve at that particular moment.
The under stated & under exposed Saskatchewan Art
Shoreditch has been housing its very own Canada Water, Saskatchewan till Oct 18th. Saskachewan means “swiftly flowing river” in one of Canadian’s aboriginal language Cree, namesake of the province in Canada where the artists from the current exhibition were curated, by world-renowned artist and Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medalist Adrian Stimson.
Stimson’s explained that the narrative for putting together this exhibition very much converges themes of identity and diversity, in a largely vacant land of Saskatchewan where indigenous and colonial influences meet and simultaneously uphold strong socialism and economy. This exhibition is a mini museum to harbour a united people with as a complex makeup as of any post-colonial society, a 20/20 vision into a harmonious and tenacious space distilled to fit into the trendy Shoreditch studio Blackall.
“Saskatchewan artists are a force to be reckoned with, these 27 artists have and will continue to evolve Saskatchewan’s story.” Says Stimson.
The coherence of the exhibition is striking. The paintings, photography, sculptures, ceramics, bead, stone and wood works nest comfortably amongst one another, having been fed by the same flowing water, emanate nostalgia and imagination.
“Saskatchewan” is currently being held at the Blackall Studios in Shoreditch till 18th Oct before continuing to Bilbao, Spain from 29th Oct – 2nd Nov. Please check Creative Saskatchewan for more details on upcoming events.
A work in review: ELLY LIYANA RUSLAN
At first glance, Elly Liyana Ruslan’s work comes off as a soft serve swirl of youthful naivety and muted colors. Her illustrations and paintings usually depict portraits, picturesque settings, and animals. The artist states that her work is “fragments of her personal thoughts and memories combined together to form a reflection of something intimate yet openly displayed.” Like a Wes Anderson film, her work is stunning, but, as with The Royal Tenenbaums, darkness looms beneath a pretty picture surface.
Ruslan was born in 1987 in Singapore; in her latest work, the relationships portrayed build complexity. People are posed with animals, but for what purpose? Is she contextualizing Eisenstein’s use of montage? Is it meant to represent the battle of man versus nature, or is it merely meant to make for a pleasant aesthetic? The mirror image is also a repeating subject throughout the artist’s work; are the images of twins or multiple parts of one personality? Her piece ‘Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing’ might give us a hint as to what she is trying to get at. Perhaps, the artist is trying to turn us all into skeptics… Many of the themes of the artist’s new work has carried over from the past, nature, the double image, and portraits. Her earlier illustrations, however, have a stripped down quality and she also has a lovely series of defacements.
There’s one clue left Ruslan places on her site that allows outsiders to peak into the mind of the artist:
“The satisfaction she gets from creating art is knowing that a part of her exists in the work… And if you look at them close enough, you’ll find her story.”
Robot reboot: CONRAD SHAWCROSS at The Vinyl Factory
With choreographed dance moves and a dazzling display of light, one may find it hard to believe that Ada, Conrad Shawcross’ rhythmic robot, has not always been the dancing droid that she is today.
Prior to her starring role in Shawcross’ Ada Project, the bot started out as an industrial apparatus in a factory. Repurposed and reprogrammed by Shawcross, Ada – named after Ada Lovelace, a 19thcentury mathematician – is now so much more than a cog in a machine.
For The Ada Project, Shawcross commissioned four female artists to compose music to accompany Ada’s dancing. Rather than establishing a soundtrack and then tweaking Ada’s movements accordingly, Shawcross has opted for a different approach: to present Ada to the composers as a means to “inspire, rather than be determined by, the pieces of music”. After observing Ada’s gestures, each musician created a tune to complement her mechanized movements, elevating Ada from lowly piece of machinery to jazzed-up muse. Now, as an instrumental and illuminated installation, Ada marches to the beat of her own drummer – literally.
Check out Conrad Shawcross’ The Ada Project at the Vinyl Factory now through 31 October!
An evening with artists FRANK BOWLING
The Royal Academy of Arts hosts ‘In Conversation with Frank Bowling’ ahead of the artist’s Traingone exhibition in Stockholm’s Spirit museum, looking at selected works from 1979–96.
Frank Bowling RA moved to London in 1950 from Guyana and nine years later began studying at the Royal College of Art after gaining a scholarship. Since graduating in 1962, Bowling has travelled the world with studios in both London and New York. His work has transitioned from figurative to abstract pieces, exploring and experimenting with colour, size and texture.
His upcoming Traingone exhibition named after one of his 1966 paintings, showcases his intriguing attention to colour that emerged in his later work and the unique textures he created. Allowing the colourful paint to take control of the finished work, dripping down the surface; he called his paintings ‘poured’, relinquishing control and leaving the appearance of his work to chance.
In 2005 Bowling was elected as a member of the Royal Academy of Art, becoming the first black Royal Academician in the institution’s 200 years and for one evening he returns and will be conversing with Mel Gooding, art critic and author of the Frank Bowling monograph for the Royal Academy.
Bowling’s work can be found permanently displayed in New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, as well as in the Tate Gallery in London.
FILIPPOS TSITSOPOULOS: Kage-where K for kott
Photos by Sonia Arias
Filippos Tsitsopoulos is a painter, installation, video theatre and performance media artist who has worked in the field of interactive theatre installation art, exploring the limits of performance and painting since 1990. His practice engages the spectator/participant to a new theatre or rather a system of including theatre as a catalyst of our daily life. This is precisely the case for his latest project, Kage – Where K for Kott. We had the chance to speak with Filippos and gain more of an insight into his intriguing background of work.
To begin, could you give us a brief background into your work?
Well even if I’m not working with painting, I consider myself a painter who decides to use other artistic disciplines as canvases; like video theatre installation, traditional repertory theatre and performance. I have worked in the field of interactive theatre installation, exploring the limits of performance, as well as in painting since 1990. My practice engages the spectator/participant to a new system including theatre as a catalyst of our daily life. How theatre can change our reality and ourselves.
I use concepts that belong to the theatre, traditional and modern. These concepts are applied to visual arts, observing the effects that they produce. With the use of self-made masks produced from living materials, animals or plants, I construct parallel equivalents that enclose and juxtapose temporally disproportionate elements.
The dialogue with the history of Art is always alive in my works and in my life, due to the fact that I was part of the external collaborators of the educational department of the Prado Museum in Madrid from 2005 to 2012. I held workshops related to drawing and art aesthetic, with the theme ‘Irony in Art’ almost every day during that period.
‘Irony in Art’ was also my research theme during my Doctorate studies in Fine Arts at Complutense University of Madrid from 1990 to 1996. Before that I studied in Greece, painting at the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki in the Faculty of Fine Arts from 1985 to 1990.
This relation with the theatre, with history of Art, with a big personal loss combined with my childhood memories, makes me create a system of works as independent ways of thought and reflection, on concepts derived from the performance and the theatre.
What inspired you to move into the realm of video theatre and performance?
The impossibility to communicate the issues that happened to me was the main reason. Although I studied painting, theatre came up, it was inevitable, and the love of all the masks, ‘layers of onions of an actor’s visibility or invisibility,’ make me jump through painting and performance.
The most unforgettable story for the development of this performance system was this one:
Long ago, back in the year 1993, the day that my mother died, I was still a student. My father, a professional actor, was interpreting Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Athens. I must say that this performance was memorable and imposing. My father, completely destroyed by the loss of his wife, buried the same day, dedicated his entire performance to her. It was obvious that all his gestures that night on the stage were speaking about her. The climax was when Polonius had to say, reading the letter of love from Hamlet to his daughter Ophelia, the words “Doubt thou the stars are fire, doubt that the sun doth move, Doubt truth to be a liar, but never doubt about my love, my love, never doubt about my love, my love…”
My father repeated “never doubt about my love, my love” so many times that the other actors on the stage remained astonished, and knowing that the very same day my mother had passed away, they decided to remain inert looking at one another. The public did not understand what was happening and they began applauding, touched by the text and its constant repetition and the emotion of the interpretation; so much so that they finally had to stop the performance for a few minutes because the people were continually applauding. And without understanding why this scene had upset them so much, they kept on applauding.
I CONSIDER MY ART AS A ‘SABOTAGE OF MY OWN REALITY’
Later on, it was the first night that my mother was not at home waiting for us… and while I was heating my father’s meal for dinner, he told me, “That was for her (for my mother) you know”. And he continued: “And you like Laertes, (his son in the scene) please try, in your life to be honest with yourself and with it, as the night continues to day, you cannot be false to anybody…”
It was obvious that he carried on interpreting the role at home, believing or trying to convince himself that the reality we live in, the ‘truthiness’ of life, can be inverted in the theatre and extend into art. The reality we live in, brought back to the theatre; the theatre representing life, with all of our belongings part of a big stage and scenery of life.
A few years later in 2006 when my father died, I decided to watch all of his videos and performances, read and remember all of the roles, study all of the monologues, in a kind of obsession to understand my infancy and adolescence in my house full of theatre and interpretation. I constantly read essays from Harold Pinter to Gombrowicz and from Berry to Brecht and Beckett, to Peter Weiss and Marat Sade and began to articulate an enormous work of more than 72 videos of monologue performances.
I began interpreting Polonius for my father. I transformed my face with living elements, creating a flexible mask according to the face muscles and the movement of the mouth, imitating the red beard of the Danish Polonius. I played my first text for him saying exactly the same words as the ones he said for my mother. I transformed myself to communicate with my deceased father. The conclusion of a lifetime, the impossible answers to questions of our zeitgeist, how can you play or act in life and in theatre and what about if these roles could be inverted? Was this a starting point or the beginning of a philosophy for my father as actor and person — and my philosophy too, about life, religion, death and love.
I consider my art as a ‘sabotage of my own reality,’ and the reality of others as well. I use my face and my body in a concise and clear forefront. My face is like the vehicle that serves to transmit the message. And the message is a question or many perhaps: What would happen if the theatre could be used in our life to replace the reality? What would happen if our everyday life were transformed to tragedy?
I refer to all physical and mental consequences of the tragedy, including the sacrifice and the Oedipus blindness: To ‘see’ will let you blind? And the most important: How might we continue a stage play if one of its personages goes crazy, or simply it is not necessary, the zeitgeist that we live on, has replaced him or overcome it?
If there is an absence of tragic figures in our life why then do we not do the Oedipus tragedy, without Oedipus? Are theatre and its archetypes sufficient to answer to the current human existence and its questions? Or is it only a theatrical archaeology?”
Your father was an actor and you also speak a lot about famous literary figures. Have artists across different disciplines always played a part in your work?
If there is an absence of tragic figures in our life why then do not we do the Oedipus tragedy, without Oedipus? That is the question that someone must ask, wondering where all the famous literary figures go. I really care about the issues that come up when someone is looking at tragedy for instance. I don’t care too much let’s say about Euripides life, but I’m passionate about Oedipus. This became the purpose of my work.
As Jan Hoet, director of the Documenta IX in Kassel mentioned about my works “Filippos is working with art as subject. Art itself is capable to create Art.” To speak and express myself with borrowed words, brings me near to the behaviour of an actor who learns and studies an already observed and analysed reality and embodies someone else’s face, but beneath my face lies memories from reality.
I use my face, destroying it with pixels or masks, to recreate a natural disaster. The human suffering behind that mask and feeling of an impassive nature to human suffering is inverted through dramatization and theatre.
In Greek vases, almost all the figures are looking sideways, except figures that should face death; who are the only ones looking in front. So all my video portraits are figures who mentally are dealing with Hades. In Ancient Greece, before performing a tragedy role, the mythology says that Greek actors must ask permission to play from Hades, the kingdom of death.
I USE MY FACE, DESTROYING IT WITH PIXELS OR MASKS, TO RECREATE A NATURAL DISASTER
This is where the Greek tradition is placing the actor before the play. To find a specific image to respond to in one of my monologues is like juggling in the circus between nothingness and wholeness. The circus contains specific images. Everything in the circus is happening ‘for real’. The dancer dances with ‘real risk’ in a real rope, and the bear tamer shows only the spectacle of wild-domesticated animals. When ‘something happens’ really means that the image is at a ‘precise point’ or a ‘thing’. The actor’s face and the ‘garment’ is an image. If the actor interprets himself, though he remains an actor, it is a ‘precise point’. But, if he identifies himself with the person he interprets, then the images produced are ‘mimetic symbols’. Looking at the passageway between actual time and theatrical time, imagined space with the real, is my aim.
Where did inspiration for your latest project, Kage – Where K for Kott, come from? What will the performances consist of?
It is very common for an artist to use his home ground as a canvas. Having a repertory actor as my father, makes you inevitably a silent witness of his rehearsals at home. This fact can change you forever. Endgame, Hamlet and Othello, Berry, Bart, Beckett, from Jerzy Grotowski to Giorgio Strehler and from Ibsen to Calderon, to Peter Weiss, Suzuki Tadashi, Peter Sellars, Heiner Müller, Tony Harrison, and Thomas Murphy, to Kafka’s “a cage went in search of a Bird…”
If this is the conclusion of a lifetime with your father, then you must close to a religion called “Ionesco” and the person to swear, as Peter Brook’s said, is “in the name of the Bible of Jan Kott”. Theatre is the medium through which to understand the world. Jan helped me understand what it means to find the non-evident in the evident, and the evident in the non-evident.
The project is related to a big forgotten person: Jan Kott. A series of filmed performances in public spaces and monologues/reflections based on his two books, Shakespeare our Contemporary and Theatre of Essence, (which are actually closer to literature than to essays), will be used as theatrical texts for my monologues, to reconstruct the imaginary life of Jan in London. Like Joyce’s Ulysses which revisits “payments” of a day time mythology, the character who is playing Kott, will revisit all his main theatrical subjects from Ionesco to Gombrowitcz, his relation with art and life, to his beloved and magical actress Ida Kaminska, well known from her Oscar title but also for her awesome interpretation of Mother Courage in Brecht’s play.
I had the good fortune of seeing a performance similar to this from the Greek actress Katina Paxinou when I was six or seven years old. Jan Kott knew Paxinou well and several times saw that play to include her in his specific book about Drama. My father, a repertory actor, was acting the role of the priest in Brecht’s play next to Paxinou. I barely remember Mr. Kott now, but his smile, his black shirt and he enjoying like a child the cakes Paxinou offered to both of us backstage. Almost every night after school I was in the theatre backstage doing my homework, watching Brecht’s play, enjoying my father’s acting, as every kid would do, every afternoon, until my mother, who usually finished work later would come and take me home.
Well, this project starts mentally from my home ground and is transported to the theatrical ground of London, creating performances in public spaces, scenarios and monologues, and reflections about theatre and life, as if I was metaphorically wearing the skin of Kott. In my works is living in London, walking the streets, watching galleries and Museums, sleeping on a boat by the river, approaching nearby strangers and talking with them and using masks as Kott’s favorite element of his Verfremdunseffekt (Distancing effect).
Acting is putting on other faces and embodying someone else’s soul. This journey was inspired by Kafka and “a cage went in search of a bird”, which became “Kage- where K for Kott”; video- filmed- performances and monologues all over London. This work will be displayed in a Gallery as a photography and large-scale multi channel video installation and will have several exhibitions when finished.
How important is the role of spectator/participant to your work? How much of a part will the spectators play in this piece? What is the final goal of this piece?
As a Joycian Ulyssean journey, where Homer’s Ullyses embodies the Joycian one and vice versa, as the Marquis de Sade and Marat in the Peter Weiss play shift into the other, there is no theatre without spectator. The only difference is that in theatre language we see things opposite, as well as in my works, from the end to the beginning from left to right. All this is like the classic theatre paradigm of the mirror, when Hamlet tells his actors to pull up a mirror so that they may view themselves, and if a theatre is a mirror then “the right is left in and the left is right. In the mirror, our heart is on the right side, we cross with our left hand”. And if we ask ourselves what is real in the theatre, then probably we will answer: the chairs. Yet these chairs when taken from the auditorium and set on the stage, they are no longer chairs but representations of chairs or “spots” in theatre language, like Ionesco`s empty chairs are waiting for the viewers to come. I also aim to convert the audience into actors.
The second part that I am now developing in London, is called The Grimaces Competition Bus and is drawn from an essay by Jan Kott about an incident that took place during the Second World War in Poland. During one long night of constant bombing, two Warsaw actors are trying, during this awful night, to fight and win a strange competition:
“The ugliest and most horrible grimace of the world made by the muscles of a human face”.
Finally, we don’t know who was the winner of this absurd expressionistic behaviour, but it was used as an example by Ionesco later on to his students of how performance could push boundaries and limits and how opposite the so called theatrical truth is from reality. The Grimaces Competition Bus is the digital and technological reconstruction and adaptation in a modern life and public art form of that incident.
In a Hackney central 38 London bus are installed 120 screens in its exterior façade and lateral, as well as in the upper outside roof. People are invited to get in and make a grimace and then give the reason for the horror or the joy of their feelings, and or any personal or political disappointments.
In every stop of the bus new people will come up and new grimaces will be added in the timeline of the day. Every grimace will be filmed and streamed on the flat television screens on the exterior of the bus. This event will be collecting grimaces all over London. Older ‘grimaces’ (from the days before) will be added on hard discs and streamed in some of the outer screens of the bus, while on other screens, the new ones will be performed totally live.
EVERY END EMBODIES EVERY BEGINNING
The inside part of the bus will be removed to include a space with one camera, waiting to record the reaction of a passenger to a memory or to something related to a grimace. A video edition and streaming team of volunteers and people explaining the action and the artist will be there to help and give them guidance points. Every day the artist will perform a two hour sequence of grimaces streaming them directly on one outer screen of the bus.
The Grimaces Competition is an adaptation a modern life form of that Warsaw incident but in an outside inverted shape. The metaphor of the attack of the commercial markets, art markets, social markets, art war, ‘the constant bombing of the human rights and work’, as well as the cuts of all type of benefits due to the new order of things, which embrace with indifference the unprotected citizens, makes critical the reaction and activation of the series of primary feelings and interior nerve mechanics, spasms and expressions and the use of them as the possible theatrical Utopia. In the exterior of the bus, as well as in Ancient Greece feasts the Eleusinian Telesterion (initiation hall) and Ex Amaxis events will turn too into a live structure society performance.
It can be considered as a collective absurd comedy drama viewed live but in video. In the outside part of the bus there are nearly two hundred or more connected and adapted flat television screens. In our theatrical modern theory, the fact of the two actors competing for the most horrible grimace under the sound of bombing Warsaw is translated to London reality.
This work will perform from the inside and will criticize with grimace and absurdity, the world of nowadays. This theatre bus will not stay hidden but will reveal the expression of the inner protected or unprotected presence of territorial freedom and the mechanics that arise in the human being in order to defend himself psychologically and physically from an external pressure, defeat the fear, as well the sadness. Grimaces as the weapon to face the impossibility, to formulate coherent actions and thoughts is doing exactly the opposite if we invert it.
Will these works be exhibited anywhere?
The idea of the Opposite, mentioned before is the matrix of this project. The works will start in galleries and institutions, filming myself there with my masks in places such as The Serpentine Galleries, The Whitechapel and Frieze art fair and will end in a social project where the Bus will be the final destination. When this overall work is finished, it will be exhibited one more time in several galleries. At this moment a map is being created to get all the locations, from museums and galleries to theatres and pubs that are taking part in this journey. To work with the Opposite, to bring the end and the purpose of something in the very beginning of your investigation or a project, is philosophical. Every end embodies every beginning. This reminds me of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing 1729-1781 and how prophetic his words were about how art shapes are translated, and with this I would like to finish with, “Poetry finally is spoken painting, and painting is poetry who remains in silence” from Laocoon.
EVERYTHING EVERYTHING take up residency at Manchester's Central Library
Everything Everything present ‘Chaos To Order,’ a week-long event in November which hosts not only a plethora of exciting dance and musical performances but notably sees the Mercury-nominated band creating new material there within the library walls.
Collecting inspiration from the building’s Grade II listed architecture, visitors can watch the band creating new compositions; perhaps even witnessing the production of tracks that may appear on their forthcoming third album.
The aim of the event is to bring in fresh audiences to the newly re-opened library, to inspire imaginations and inject some ‘chaos’ into the typical library order. One of the highlights of the week will be a live broadcast of BBC radio 6 show Radcliffe and Maconie with Everything Everything appearing as guests, alongside Elbow’s Guy Garvey and Bernard Sumner from New Order.
Some other main events include theatre performances inspired by the library’s visitors, poetry readings from novelist Emma Jane Unsworth and musician Kiran Leonard. For one week only the Central library will be transformed into a creative hub. A place usually of independent thought and study will instead become a realm of shared extraordinary experiences unlike anything else.
Chaos To Order will take place 10th-15th November.
Some events have limited capacity and tickets will need to be purchased.
Photo by Jan-Chlebik
Hand-stitched & tea-stained: The creations of MISTER FINCH
When it comes to subject matter, textile artist Mister Finch finds himself drawn to woodland specimens and whimsical beasts like a moth to a flame.
While the pieces created by Leeds-based artist Mister Finch look as if they were plucked straight from a forest, they are not of your common garden variety. Reminiscent of vintage botanical illustrations and evoking the charm and enchantment of a storybook, one might expect to see the artist’s flora, fauna, and fungi specimens mounted behind glass or displayed in a bell jar. This is because Finch, who goes solely by his remarkably fitting surname, seeks to “create specimens that look like they have been collected from somewhere else”. Moths sporting wings of fleshy velvet, cobwebs comprised of twiddled nylon, and speckled textile magpies are among his enchanting body of work, whose components Finch has described as “fairytale samples”.
Due to the astonishing level of care and detail apparent in his art, one may be surprised to hear that Finch is entirely self-taught when it comes to sewing, as he “works alone and makes everything himself by hand”. By combining his hand-sewn vintage textile bodies with unwanted objects found at car boot sales and thrift shops, Finch is able to create exquisite works that both transcend reality and remain down-to-earth. Old postcards become specimen mounts, while “a lonely chess piece or a stray bead” suddenly sprouts a purpose. While Finch is typically busy as a bee sorting out new homes for his creatures, he does, occasionally, grow attached and keep them for himself — like Oonah, a moth with “a beautiful white fur body and carpet for wings” who’s now perched on a wall in his “studio full of books, glass jars, and naughty cats”.
Interested in these delightful creatures but not near Mister Finch’s neck of the woods? No Problem! Check out his little shop on Etsy or his portfolio if you find his beasts to be your tarnished cup of tea.
*All images used with permission by Mister Finch
ALEX CRAIG
Stylistic and bold, Craig’s work exposes a world that is gritty and paranoid.
The imagery present in his art suggests an inner struggle to find a place in civilised society, with lone figures standing at a crossroads between salvation and destruction. His art seems to convey a desperate communication with the viewer, urging them to witness the fragile world we live in and the chaos under the surface. With his striking use of vibrant imagery, his work appears to evoke print advertisement, drawing the viewer into the fantasy presented to us and posing questions about the world we live in. Figures present in the work either blend into the background, becoming a part of the landscape itself — perhaps a message about our fragile connection to the environment — or stand out against a few simple ‘Pop Art’ colours.
It is often the colour itself that drives a piece, with our attention drawn to contrasting colours that help to set the tone of the work. In this way, Craig directs the viewer’s gaze, allowing the eye to rest momentarily on key components, highlighting central themes. These combine motifs of religion, violence, and exploitation, sometimes juxtaposed with delicate patterns and intricate line work.
Overall, Craig has produced a body of work that comments on society and seeks to question our relationship to the world around us, with his strong use of popular iconography combined with otherworldly, often mythical figures in a variety of situations.
3D PHOTOGRAPHY IN VICTORIAN AGE
Who would have thought that among the already eminent hats Dr. Brian May wears, the founding figure of Queen, a guitarist and an astronomer, he is now adding one more as the co-curator of “Poor man’s picture gallery”: Victorian Art and Stereoscopic Photography at Tate Britain. It’s another kind of fine debut. For the first time Tate hosts the rare displays of stereographs collected by May where photographers like Michael Burr and Alexis Gaudin seized the 3D craze at the very birth of photography in 1850s. Stereographs consisting two photographs taken in marginally varied positions are place side by side, when viewed up close, the three-dimensional tableaux invites gasps that are no less astonished today than at their first creation 150 years ago, in return influencing traditional paintings of its days.
“Poor man’s picture gallery”: Victorian Art and Stereoscopic Photography
On view at Tate Britain
13 Oct 2014 – Apr 2015
CHEYENNE SCHIAVONE
The thing about someone whose work traverses painting (although the term is non-conclusive here), music and writing is that, she/he can really fathom a coherent language in any form to hit a dissonant note but still leave you strangely affiliated inside. Cheyenne Schiavone’s watercolour is one as such, an unshrinking but recognizable scrutiny of us and “the others” marked in permanent paint.
You studied history prior to becoming a painter and DJ, has that intellectual engagement determined your thinking as an artist?
Choosing studying history was more of an evidence to me, but it has probably strengthened me in my core logic: in any field – whether it’s art, thought or practice of any kind – I’ve always been thinking in terms of origins, aspects and then consequences. As everyone knows, it’s also the basic schema of an essay. I guess this is why the conclusions I use to give as an artist are not particularly gentle.
Take one example from the series No Future, you wrote “On ne nait pas femme, on le devient.”(One is not born a woman, one becomes.) How much volume does text speak in your paintings?
Let’s say that my work doesn’t consist so much in the representation of what it depicts, but rather in the analysis of a particular topic. This is mainly observations of a very contemporary social malaise, and the text is of major importance to me in order to confront a lot of ideas so that their manifestations in the final work are not exclusively emotional and may cause a kind of break in the minds of people I’m talking to.
“…WORDS AND SHORN THOUGHTS ARE THE RAW MATERIAL OF THE ATMOSPHERE THAT CAN BE FOUND IN WHAT I DO.”
This year you have handwritten Le Petit Prince with illustrations on a sketchbook. Was handwriting the entire story a form of meditation?
In a way, yes. In fact, this project was born as a result of an umpteenth reading of the original work by Saint-Exupery. It then became clear to me that the thought put in abyss through the various protagonists that the Petit Prince meets throughout his journey naturally unravels a major part of the problems that the human faces in his lifetime, making it more of a philosophical manual than the childish tale you are given as your first book – which seems quite a heresy but can do no harm. The message it delivers is indisputably universal; so, although I was seeking it out someone in particular, this work made possible reactions on my own and of course of a wider audience.
The paintings are bemused in either a moment of disposition or a fleeting gesture of the body. Do you consider your work a swift, impressionistic rendering or a meticulously built composition? How much planning goes into it?
It is an established fact that I bring more attention to the idea of hich result my painting than to its rendering: it consists more of a process of dislocation and renewed perspective of human emotions and expressions of a troubled time than to a substantive pictorial work. These paintings are only messages, sometimes abrupt and wild, tending to express one of these obvious issues and disorders that a thought, such as emitted in Le Petit Prince for example, could likely resolve. It is a thought ahead report, but intuitive in its realization and expression. As such, time is not particularly to take into account.
Do your characters all have a reference in real life?
No, my characters are just nowadays’ human beings, therefore experiencing major issues arising from the progressively installed existentialist doctrine of our time, scanning numerous theological, philosophical or moral concepts which, although perceived by contemporaries as a form of obscurantism, enabled man to rest on a few fundamental rules for his balance.
Do you ever project yourself in the paintings? How do you think about self-portraits?
I practiced a lot self-portrait, and will probably do it again in the future; not by self-interest but because I felt that these visions were mine. They echo an analysis of a question I digested my way, but which are rooted in the human, and then not necessarily me. That’s why the characters I paint have less and less overt signs of particular identity. It’s more in order to express really personal primal screams that I sometimes still go through it.
Bearing many roles – painter, DJ, scriptwriter – how do you balance the ears and the hands at work?
The balance among the three roles comes naturally because, somehow, I express the same things in all these areas: things that are inseparable from the information we have all more or less assimilated so far, which make some of us not pessimistic but skeptical and willing to move forward without forgetting the considerable luggage we are dragging up that hill.
Which one of these roles took shape first?
It has probably all begun with writing. This, of course, left the door open to many other forms of expression: words and shorn thoughts are the raw material of the atmosphere that can be found in what I do.
Do you see these roles as separate or a unity?
Definitely as a unity. I’m not free, I’m three. Maybe more… who knows?
How would you say your perception of painting has evolved thus far?
I don’t really consider my work as painting but like “journalistic pop art”, in a way. Besides, I don’t hide my shortcomings in terms of technique, so what I do hasn’t affected my vision of painting in any way: facing a painting or any other pictorial work, I keep an ignorant look. I don’t deny having received a good culture nor appreciating the finesse of a well done job, but I could never let these things take precedence over the shock that happens – or not – inside me.
Your latest exhibition at Young International Artists (YIA) is open now in Paris. What’s to be expected?
The exhibition “Sang Neuf” is part of the YIA, a FIAC Off art fair and dedicated to the French artistic new guard. It’s a great privilege to exhibit during the contemporary art week in Paris… so I’m really glad to be part of it and there will be a lot to see. But as far as I’m concerned, I let the bad student raging in me talk and made of the space that was given to me, with the kind support of Arnaud Faure Beaulieu (mister No Mad Galerie), a place where words and slaughters will know no compromises.
Exhibition Sang Neuf is open now in Paris, 22 – 26 Oct